…well? And that matters. Because it’s not just about using social media, but using it well. That is, responding to the Digital Age isn’t just a matter of having a Facebook page or semi-lame (or even pretty good) website. Rather, it’s thinking with care about the variety of channels of communication that are available to us today in order to support our people in their Christian walk. Of course, the very thing that makes this moment so amazing in terms of our ability to share the Gospel and equip people for lives of faith – the nearly uncountable number of communication channels available to us – is precisely that which makes...

With six hours of travel and another inspiriting site visit, yesterday was too busy to post. Unbelievably bumpy roads, suspension bridges, incredibly gracious hosts, insight into the lives of the people that produce the cocoa beans from which comes the chocolate that so many of us love, and more all filled the day to overflowing. The cooperative we visited consisted of more than 65 small farms (often of about two or three acres each) and growing. It takes 25 farms to come together to form a co-operative, and often many co-operatives are drawn together to form a second-tier, or national co-operative in order to most effectively partner...

I’m in Honduras this week for a Board Meeting of Lutheran World Relief. Most of our Board Meetings, I should probably say, are not in Honduras, but in Baltimore, Maryland, the headquarters of LWR. But every three years, the staff plans a Board Meeting and retreat at one of the sites where LWR is doing work so that the Board can gain a more three-dimensional sense of the importance and challenges of this work. After two full days of meetings and reports and strategic planning and all the rest, today we went to visit one of the project sites where LWR staff and their Honduran partners are working to help those Jesus refers to as “the...

This past week while traveling, I started reading James Carroll’s Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age. While I spend most of my time on planes writing – emails, mostly, occasionally a post, not nearly enough just writing – I like to have a book with me during takeoff and landing, those times when “laptop computers must be shut.” Carroll, NY Times bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword picks up in this book his exploration of the relationship between Christians and Jews. But this time it’s less historical investigation than it is personal memoir combined with some biblical study...

An epiphany is a revelation or awakening and comes from a Greek word that is translated most literally as a “revealing,” a manifestation of the divine. We use the word in everyday language to talk about a moment of deep insight or awareness when all the pieces fall together. In Christian use, Epiphany names the day, January 6th, when we celebrate that revelation that Jesus Christ is the light of the world. Of the whole world, actually, and that’s where the connection between Epiphany and the story of the three magi in Matthew comes. For while Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, Christians confess that through him God seeks to save the whole...

Fifty years ago Charles Schulz somehow managed to convince TV execs to break all the rules – no laugh track, the use of children’s voices only, a sober message critical of commercialization, a long and unaccompanied reading of the Bible at the climax of the show – to produce “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Given what has transpired since, Schulz’s concern about he commercialization of Christmas seems almost quaint. In truth, it turns out he was simply prescient…and perhaps prophetic, never more so than in the seven minutes of that television spectacle captured below. Amid the hustle and bustle of the...